done.
Take away the bottle, before the overseer comes in. If any man says I am
not sober, that man lies. The Rhine wine has a way of humming in one's
head. That's all, Mr. Overseer--that's all. Do I see the sun rising, up
there in the skylight? I wish you good-night; I wish--you--good--night."

He laid his heavy arms on the table; his head dropped on them--he slept.

The time passed. No sound broke the silence but the lumpish snoring of
Schwartz. No change appeared in Jack; there he lay, staring up at the
moon.

Somewhere in the building (unheard thus far in the uproar) a clock struck
the first hour of the morning.

Madame Fontaine started. The sound shook her with a new fear--a fear that
expressed itself in a furtive look at the cell in which the dead woman
lay. If the corpse-bell rang, would the stroke of it be like the single
stroke of the clock?

"Jack!" she whispered. "Do you hear the clock? Oh, Jack, the stillness is
dreadful--speak to me."

He slowly raised himself. Perhaps the striking of the clock--perhaps some
inner prompting--had roused him. He neither answered Madame Fontaine, nor
looked at her. With his arms clasped round his knees, he sat on the floor
in the attitude of a savage. His eyes, which had stared at the moon, now
stared with the same rigid, glassy look at the alarm-bell over the
cell-door.

The time went on. Again the oppression of silence became more than Madame
Fontaine could endure. Again she tried to make Jack speak to her.

"What are you looking at?" she asked. "What are you waiting for? Is
it----?" The rest of the sentence died away on her lips: the words that
would finish it were words too terrible to be spoken.

The sound of her voice produced no visible impression on Jack. Had it
influenced him, in some unseen way? Something did certainly disturb the
strange torpor that held him. He spoke. The tones were slow and
mechanical--the tones of a man searching his memory with pain and
difficulty; repeating his recollections, one by one, as he recovered
them, to himself.

"When she moves," he muttered, "her hands pull the string. Her hands send
a message up: up and up to the bell." He paused, and pointed to the
cell-door.

The action had a horrible suggestiveness to the guilty wretch who was
watching him.

"Don't do that!" she cried. "Don't point _there!"_

His hand never moved; he pursued his newly-found recollections of what
the doctor had shown to him.

"Up and up to the be